Paganism and the British Folk Revival

Andy Letcher

Folk music in Britain has never been more popular. A nationwide calendar of folk

festivals and a thriving scene of folk clubs, pub sessions and ceilidhs, all support a body

of professional and semi-professional artists and a groundswell of amateur players.

Newcastle University runs a popular folk music degree course, the mainstream media

review the major folk releases and artistic accomplishment is recognised through the

BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. In 2006 BBC 4 produced an acclaimed three part

documentary about the history of the folk revival, Folk Britannia, and in 2010 editor of

The Wire magazine, Rob Young, published his monumental and even broader history,

Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music , to plaudits from both the literary 1

and musical worlds.

In spite of this success, ‘folk’ remains a contested term. It is not easy to say with any

great precision what does or does not count as folk music (added to which, the term has

rather different connotations within the different Anglophone nations). Because folk

music is, by definition, so bound up with notions of tradition and authenticity, what it

signifies has come to be every bit as important as what it sounds like and how it is played.

Consequently its borders are being continually negotiated.

Rob Young, Electric Eden: Uncovering Britain’s Visionary Music (London: Faber & Faber, 2010).1

Part of folk’s appeal is that it confers alterity through identification with tradition and the

past. That past tends for the most part to be heavily romanticised, typically as a rustic,

pre-Industrial or prelapsarian golden age, a simpler time of honest labour and

straightforward pleasures, and as something lost to us or very nearly forgotten (Georgina

Boyes beautifully captures the object of folk’s yearning with her memorable phrase ‘the

imagined village’ ). Both Left and Right have subsequently tried to claim folk music, and 2

the past it signifies, as their own, regarding it as the authentic voice of the working class,

or as a pure expression of the people, or folk, from a lost age of modesty, tradition and

deference, respectively . 3

But it is another aspect of the past that concerns me here, for, if we trace the folk tradition

back far enough, don’t we come to an ‘archaeological’ layer that predates Christianity? In

other words, aren’t the origins of folk music, ultimately, pagan? This assumption, which

is widely accepted in popular culture, forms a kind of lodestone about which modern folk

musicians orientate themselves. Some celebrate it or regard it as the quiddity of folk.

Others maintain a healthy distance from what they regard as a troubling episode in their

music’s history.

Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester: 2

Manchester University Press, 1993).

Boyes, The Imagined Village; Andrew Blake, The Land Without Music: Music, Culture and Society in 3

Twentieth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Niall MacKinnon, The British Folk Scene: Musical Performance and Social Identity (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994); Young, Electric Eden. This struggle is ongoing. When the far-Right British National Party attempted to use contemporary folk recordings in their campaigning leading up to the 2010 general election, they elicited a swift and angry response from folk musicians and the formation of the pressure group, Folk Against Fascism.

In this chapter I want to examine contemporary British folk music, in its widest sense, to

describe the three broad ways in which musicians relate to the supposed pagan origins of

their craft. Modern Pagans have seized upon the relationship to claim folk music as 4

theirs and to use it as a vehicle for the expression of religious identity: ‘Pagan folk’.

Others, making so-called ‘dark folk’, and who may not necessarily be practising Pagan

religionists, are drawn to the alterity of identifying with an uncanny pagan past, one

supposed to have involved not only a close and magical connection with nature but also

sexual licence and, occasionally, heinous ritual. Finally, there are those mainstream or

‘traditional folk’ musicians who might invoke the pagan past occasionally for rhetorical

ends but mostly regard it as problematic in some way.

I want to begin, however, by challenging the very idea that British traditional music has

pagan origins. I want to demonstrate that this notion derives ultimately from the wishful

thinking of Edwardian scholars, who were, in turn, influenced by a popular

misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. Traditional music in Britain is categorically

not of pagan provenance, but the indelible assumption that it is – and the need for that

assumption to be true – tell us much about the popularity of folk and paganism today.

Before I do I must declare an interest. Though I am writing as an academic, a Scholar of

Religion who specializes in Paganism, Psychedelic Spiritualities, and the impact of

Darwinism on Western thought, I am also writing as a Pagan and a folk musician. I am an

Following British convention I refer to pre-Christian religions as ‘pagan’, lower case, and modern revived 4

or reconstructed religions – known in the US as neo-Paganism – as ‘Pagan’, upper case.

unusual Pagan, partly because I do not currently belong to any group or identify with any

tradition, but mostly because I am engaged in a continuing process of reflexive

negotiation between – put simply – my heart and my head. As a relatively new religion,

Paganism has yet to adopt a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ towards its tenets (except within

some rarefied academic circles). My own academically-driven ‘suspicion’ led me to

abandon much of what I once held to be foundational Pagan beliefs and practices.

Nevertheless, my Pagan identity remains, and my ongoing ‘project’, if you will, is to find

a robust Pagan theology that will satisfy heart and head.

Similarly, as a song-writer and an instrumentalist – fronting ‘post-folk’ band Telling the

Bees and playing English bagpipes for the French/Breton/Swedish dancing that is

currently popular in the south of England – I am necessarily positioned in the ongoing

debate about what folk music is, is not, or ought to be. What follows is, therefore, the

world as I see it, from my situated and nuanced perspective, and is offered as part of an

ongoing dialogical process of narrative enquiry . 5

Constructing the ‘folk’, constructing ‘the pagan’

In 1903, Cecil Sharp, one time bank clerk and Oxford-educated musician, overheard a

Somerset labourer singing a traditional song while at work, mowing the grass. Sharp was

so moved by (the appropriately named) John England’s rendition of ‘the Seeds of Love’

that he rushed for his notebook to transcribe it. Thus began Sharp’s love affair with

Gavin Flood, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion (London: Cassell, 1999).5

English folk song, which later expanded to include folk dance. Along with other

contemporaries – the Reverend Sabine Baring Gould, Francis J. Child, George

Butterworth, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Lucy Broadwood and Ernest J. Moeran, to name a

few – Sharp began collecting, notating and publishing folk songs (albeit in a somewhat

sanitised form) and proselytising for their dissemination in the classroom, and beyond as

a kind of ‘national music’.

The word ‘folk’ itself has German origins and is particularly associated with the

Romantic philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). Herder, writing before

German unification, drew attention to the importance of the German language, which was

widely disparaged by German intellectuals at the time, and the significance of ordinary

people, the volk. The volk, he argued, were not an illiterate rabble of pitchfork waving

peasants, but the very soil from which language, culture and ultimately nationhood itself

sprang. Left to flourish, each distinct volk – shaped by climate and terrain – would be

predisposed to evolve a unique form of political organization tailored to its character. We

should therefore delineate and arrange nations on the basis of these ‘organic

communities’, which would be easily picked out by commonalities of language, custom

and culture . Such was his vision for a united Germany, which, in the light of subsequent 6

events, now seems highly problematic.

F. M. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); William A. 6

Wilson, “Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism,” in Folklore: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Volume 2, ed. Alan Dundes (London: Routledge, 2005).

But prior to the rise of National Socialism (inspired, in part, by Herder’s nationalism),

Herder’s influence was regarded more benignly and we can see the traces of his ideas at

work in Sharp’s understanding of folk music. Sharp defined the folk song as “the unaided

composition of the [musically] unskilled” . Handed down and changed by many 7

generations it is nevertheless a ‘spontaneous utterance’ , ‘a communal and racial product, 8

the expression in musical idiom of aims and ideals that are primarily national in

character’ . By recording and preserving folk music, Sharp and his contemporaries 9

believed they were saving something quintessentially English, something that modernity

was in danger of stripping away. (As we shall see, this idea, that the tradition needs to be

protected from the times, remains central to folk.)

Sharp was less concerned about the question of origins than many of his contemporaries,

who argued about whether folk songs had been originally composed by individuals or

collectively in groups. For Sharp, every folk song was made anew each time it was

performed. Songs were like “the acorns which fell last autumn from an oak. The tree is,

perhaps, an old one and has its roots in the past, but the acorns are the products of a

season’s growth” . The search for origins was therefore a rather futile exercise. He did, 10

however, concede that “Wassail songs, and carols associated with the May-day festival,

Cecil Sharp, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions (London: Simkin & Co. Ltd.), 7.7

Ibid, 1.8

Ibid, x.9

Ibid, 125.10

are pagan survivals” . That he could make such an adamant yet unsupported assertion 11

was due to another related and widely held discourse of the time: the idea that all manner

of folk customs, rites, dances, legends and even children’s rhymes and games, were relics

of an ancient fertility cult centred on an annually dying and reborn vegetation god. This

discourse, likewise, can be traced back, in part, to German romanticism.

Herder’s nationalistic writings famously inspired the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

to begin collecting märchen, or fairy-tales. The brothers worked under the assumption

that these stories were expressions of what Herder had termed the volksgeist, the spirit of

the folk, and therefore that the tales captured and encapsulated some unique German-

ness . Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) was similarly inspired by Herder to produce his 12

monumental philological study of the German language, his Geschichte der Deutschen

Sprache of 1848. Like fellow philologists of the time, Grimm had discovered that

languages not only change through time (for the worse, he thought) but they also split and

divide, giving birth to new tongues . Two implications followed. 13

Ibid, 101.11

See Stefan Arvidsson, “Aryan Mythology as Science and Ideology,” Journal of the American Academy of 12

Religion 67, no. 2 (1999), 327-354.

Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: The Evolution of Mankind’s Greatest Invention (London: 13

Arrow Books, 2006).

First, working backwards, there must have been an original language from which all

others sprang, an ursprache (literally, the language of Ur, the Babylonian city where

according to Biblical mythology the tower of Babel was built ). 14

Second, if language degenerates through time – Grimm thought the High Gothic of the

Middle Ages the pinnacle of German expression – then so would any remnants of pre-

Christian mythology, preserved, as they had to have been, in the amber of language. Fairy

tales, for Grimm, were the vestigial and decrepit remains of a once much greater, but now

lost, epic cycle of Germanic, pagan mythology. As he thought the traces of paganism also

lingered in customs, folklore, legends, Gothic architecture and laws, he reasoned that just

as it were possible to work backwards to reconstruct the original ursprache, so it would

be possible to work backwards and reconstruct a picture of the original ur-religion, from

which these pagan remnants must have come.

Scholars agree now that Grimm’s premise was flawed. Fairy tales are not degenerate

myths ; the idea of pagan survivals in customs, folklore and architecture has been 15

scotched ; and the traces of paganism preserved in language (such as our ‘Wednesday’ – 16

Today linguists refer to this tongue as proto Indo-European, Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language.14

See Alan Dundes ed., Folklore: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Volumes 1 and 2 15

(London: Routledge, 2005) passim.

Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (Oxford: Blackwells, 1991); Ronald 16

Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Woden’s Day) are wholly insufficient to reconstruct original practices . But Grimm 17

made the attempt in his four volume Deutsche Mythologie (1835-78). Regarding Teutonic

paganism as a pure, if occasionally misguided, expression of the German volksgeist, he

wrote of it in rather fond terms as a happy, sensual, honourable and law-abiding faith. “I

liken Heathenism to a strange plant whose brilliant fragrant blossom we regard with

wonder; Christianity to the crop of nourishing grain that covers wide expanses. To the

Heathen too was germinating the true God, who to the Christians had matured into

fruit…” . 18

The same can not be said of Grimm’s student, Willhelm Mannhardt (1831-1880), for

whom paganism, and the idea of its persistence, proved altogether more troubling.

Mannhardt pioneered folklore research through the use of questionnaires, sent out to

willing priests and pastors across the German-speaking principalities. This new method

consequently generated vast quantities of data based on eye-witness accounts . 19

Influenced both by his mentor and by E. B. Tylor’s theories of animism and the ‘doctrine

of survivals’ – the notion that earlier ritual practices survived in folk customs like ‘living

fossils’ – Mannhardt concluded that there was a direct link between the rituals of

Classical antiquity and the contemporary harvest customs of German peasants, the latter

being the lingering and degenerate remnant of the former.

Ken Dowden, European Paganism: The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (London: 17

Routledge, 2000).

Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, translated from the fourth edition by James Steven Stallybrass 18

(London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1999 [1880]), 7.

Tove Tybjerg, “Wilhelm Mannhardt – A Pioneer in the Study of Rituals,” in Folklore: Critical Concepts 19

in Literary and Cultural Studies. Volume 2, ed. Alan Dundes (London: Routledge, 2005).

In his Wald and Feldkulte (1874-6), Mannhardt noted that in rural areas the cutting of the

last sheaf of corn was often accompanied by strange and rather barbaric rituals. The man

who made the last stroke of the scythe was, say, tied up or ridiculed or humiliated in

some way. These rites were, Mannhardt concluded, the remnants of more heinous rituals,

where the vegetation spirit (thought to be caught up in the last sheaf) had to be propitiated

with the sacrifice of a human representative to ensure a good harvest the following year.

Mannhardt’s gothic reading of harvest customs was contested in 1934 by the Danish

folklorist C. W. von Sydow, who pointed out that human representatives of plants

amongst the peasantry were rare; that harvest customs had more to do with rivalry,

ribaldry and festivity at the end of a gruelling season of labour than with any concern for

fertility or propitiation; and that the ‘spirits’ of folklore were more often than not

pedagogical fictions, designed to warn or scare children away from dangerous pursuits.

The peasants did not literally believe in vegetation spirits any more than we believe in the

bogeyman at the end of the garden . 20

Following such trenchant criticism, Mannhardt’s ideas ought not to have had the

influence they did for, to the best of my knowledge, his voluminous books have never

been translated into English. But they came to have a huge impact on the Anglophone

C. W. von Sydow, “The Mannhardtian Theories About the Last Sheaf and the Fertility Demons from a 20

Modern Critical Point of View,” Folklore 45, no. 4, 291-309.

world – and subsequently upon folk music – when they were adopted wholesale by Sir

James Frazer (1854-1941).

Frazer’s magnum opus, The Golden Bough, published in three editions between 1890 and

1915, and eventually reaching twelve volumes, is arguably one of the most influential

works of the twentieth century. Drawing upon Mannhardt, Tylor and the work of his

mentor, William Robertson Smith (1846-1894), Frazer constructed a thesis in which he

argued that the origins of all religions lie in the same, primitive vegetation cult. A dying

and reborn vegetation god – named differently as Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Baldur – was

represented on earth by a succession of divine kings and magical priests. These embodied

the god and, through seasonal and typically licentious rituals (of which Frazer included

countless examples) ensured his annual return and the fertility of the crops. But when

these king/priests grew old and infirm they had to be sacrificed and replaced with

younger, more virile representatives lest the harvest fail.

Though Frazer’s thesis and methods were roundly criticised by fellow anthropologist

Andrew Lang and others , even before his death, the influence of The Golden Bough 21

upon twentieth century thought proved immense. Jesse Weston reinterpreted Arthurian

legend and the Grail myth through the Frazerian lens . Jane Ellen Harrison and the so-22

called Cambridge Ritualists were inspired to look for the ancient origins of Greek

See Robert Ackerman, Robert, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University 21

Press, 1987); Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles; Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon.

Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993 [1919]).22

religion and Greek theatre. Lady Raglan famously named the array of foliate head

carvings found in churches from the late middle ages onwards ‘green men’ and supposed

them to be depictions of Frazer’s vegetation spirit. Anthropologist Margaret Murray

reinvented the victims of the Early-Modern witch-hunts as the last remnants of Frazer’s

fertility cult. The poet Robert Graves developed Frazer’s ideas, mixing them feverishly

with his own fanciful notions in The White Goddess . Murray and Graves, in turn, 23

helped inspire the creation of modern Wicca : Frazer’s mythology of the dying and 24

reborn god remains the core upon which modern Pagan theology is constructed. And The

Golden Bough directly influenced T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Francis Ford Coppola’s

Apocalypse Now, Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, and Robin Hardy’s cult horror

classic, The Wicker Man, to which we shall return shortly.

Most importantly for our subject here, Frazer managed to instil into popular culture a

very clear idea of ‘the pagan’, ensuring that it was everywhere associated with ‘fertility’,

and claiming that its attenuated vestiges persisted pretty much everywhere, at least once

you started to look for them. What’s more, he branded paganism as a troubling, atavistic

impulse that, like the vegetation god it was supposed to revere, could spring back to life

at any moment:

Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: Faber & Faber, 23

1961).

Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon.24

Yet we should deceive ourselves if we imagined that the belief in witchcraft is even

now dead in the mass of people; on the contrary there is ample evidence to show

that it only hibernates under the chilling influence of rationalism, and that it would

start into active life if that influence were ever seriously relaxed. The truth seems to

be that to this day the peasant remains a pagan at heart; his civilization is merely a

thin veneer which the hard knocks of life soon abrade, exposing the solid core of

paganism and savagery below . 25

Frazer was adamantly an intellectualist, in that he thought ‘primitive man’ arrived at

paganism rationally, albeit through the misapplication of scientific reasoning and a

mistaken view of causality. But as the above passage illustrates, he repeatedly gives the

impression of being an emotionalist, implying that paganism is instinctual and therefore a

throwback to an earlier stage of human evolution.

Writing in the aftermath of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species

of 1859, Frazer, like most of his contemporaries, adhered to a misunderstanding of

Darwinian natural selection, so-called ‘cultural evolution.’ This purports that human

cultures evolve just like species, from the simple to the complex, or, rather, from the

savage to the civilized . Cultural evolution moves at different rates in different places 26

James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Third Edition, Volume 11. Balder 25

the Beautiful: The Fire-Festivals of Europe and the Doctrine of the External Soul, Part 1 (London: MacMillan & Co. Ltd., 1913), viii-ix.

Gillian Bennett, “Geologists and Folklorists: Cultural Evolution and ‘the Science of Folklore’,” Folklore 26

105, 1994, 25-37.

and so, to study a primitive tribe or a peasant ritual is therefore to step back into our

evolutionary past, to see our culture as once it had been before the currents of progress

propelled us forwards and away to a superior stage of development. “Victorians who

were swallowing the idea that they were descended from apes had no trouble in accepting

the concept that savages had been the next stage in human development, especially as the

sequence turned the modern Western world into the end product of a triumphal story of

increasing technological, cultural, and intellectual progress” . 27

To an extent Frazer’s ideas proved popular because of their apparently universal

explanatory power: almost any aspect of prehistory or folklore, from stone circles to folk

dances, can be explained in terms of ‘fertility rites’. But the notion that paganism was

something inside all of us, lurking like an inner Mr Hyde behind the outward persona of

Dr Jekyll, generated a strong emotional reaction. It is this, I think, that explains quite why

his ideas have endured in the way that they have and in the face of such trenchant

academic criticism. To use Freud’s terminology, the ‘quality of feeling’ they elicited was

one of ambivalence . On the one hand paganism was abhorrent, an affront to decency 28

and an insult to intelligence; on the other paganism was fascinating, titillating even, with

the word ‘fertility’ suggesting all manner of delights behind its euphemistic veil. The idea

that, say, a children’s playground game or a May song might have pagan origins was at

Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 8.27

Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and 28

Neurotics (London: Routledge, 2001 [1913]); Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (London: Penguin Books, 2003 [1919]).

once unsettling and thrilling; or to use another Freudian term, it instilled a sense of das

unheimliche: the weird, eerie or uncanny, or, literally, the unhomely . 29

Returning now to Cecil Sharp, we have a much clearer picture of the intellectual

environment in which he was operating. His assertion that folk music bubbled up through

the peasantry as “a purely natural instinct” makes sense in the light of Herder, Grimm, 30

Mannhardt and Frazer, as does his claim that certain folk songs have pagan origins.

Indeed, Sharp’s contemporary folklorists and folk song collectors were working within a

broadly Frazerian paradigm, convinced that through their investigations they were

uncovering the indigenous remnants of the pan-European vegetation cult. Sharp’s caution

regarding the origin of folk songs was rarely heeded by others, and by the time of the

second great folk revival, in the aftermath of World War II, a discourse that entwined folk

music with paganism had become bound into the popular imagination. Its features are as

follows:

Folk song is related to paganism in that both originated as an instinctive, albeit locally

contingent, response to the vicissitudes of the natural world and, more specifically, the

agricultural year; the rituals and mythology of paganism are preserved in a fragmentary

and attenuated way in certain folk songs; those rituals took many forms though they were

always enacted (presumably with the songs to accompany them) to ensure fertility and a

Freud, The Uncanny.29

Sharp, English Folk Song, 1.30

good harvest, and they required licentious and occasionally heinous acts (human

sacrifice); and finally, paganism, lying just beneath the surface of the modern world,

could return at any time. Burdened with such ambivalent connotations, it is unsurprising

that for many, folk music acquired an almost magical ability to evoke feelings of das

unheimliche . 31

John Barleycorn and the Wicker Man

A perfect illustration of this pagan reading of folk music is provided by the traditional

song, John Barleycorn. The song is perhaps one of the most popular and well-known

from the British canon and has been performed by pretty much every professional folk

artist of the last forty years. It was brought to the attention of the wider public when it

was released by rock band, Traffic, on their album John Barleycorn Must Die in 1970.

The song exists in several historical versions but all concern the fate of the eponymous

hero, the anthropomorphic representative of barley, and each consists of the same three

structural parts: “Part A concerns the growth, harvesting, and processing of the plant, Part

B the brewing process, and part C the effects of beer upon people” . The song is 32

unambiguously a drinking song and with the earliest version appearing in a Scottish

manuscript in 1568, was composed a good eight hundred years after the formal end of

paganism in Britain.

See Young, Electric Eden.31

Peter Wood, “John Barleycorn: The Evolution of a Folk-Song Family,” Folk Music Journal 8, no. 4, 32

2004, 439.

Nevertheless, the trials of John Barleycorn with his apparent death and triumphant rebirth

– proving him ‘the strongest man at last’ – have rendered the song open to a popular and

unshakeable Frazerian reading: it is now universally regarded as alluding to a dying and

reborn vegetation god.

Thus when dynastic folk band, The Watersons, recorded it on their seminal 1965 album,

Frost and Fire: A Calendar of Ritual and Magical Songs, they described it as “an

unusually coherent figuration of the old myth of the Corn-king cut down and rising

again” . Traffic dismissed the drinking song thesis with the enigmatic but portentous 33

statement that “there are many other interpretations” . In 2005, Folk Award winner Chris 34

Wood wrote that playing the song had drawn him “deeper into the passion of the corn” . 35

When in 2007, Cold Spring Records released a double CD compilation of contemporary

‘dark folk’ (of which, more later), they titled it John Barleycorn Reborn: Dark

Britannica, explaining in the sleeve notes that “the song tells of the seasonal cycle and

the vitality of the fields renewed each year by the gods (embodied by some traditions as

the sun) through the symbolic sacrifice of the corn king, John Barleycorn” . And I have 36

heard the song played many times during modern Pagan rituals, most notably at

Lughnasadh celebrations. The song has become totemic.

The Watersons, Frost and Fire: A Calendar of Ritual and Magical Songs, CD (1965, Topic Records Ltd, 33

TSCD136, 2004), sleeve notes.

Traffic, John Barleycorn Must Die, LP (Island Records, ILPS 9116, 1970).34

Chris Wood, The Lark Descending, CD (Ruf Records, RUFCD10, 2005), emphasis added.35

Various Artists, John Barleycorn Reborn: Dark Britannica (Cold Spring, CSR84CD, 2007).36

Another totemic cultural artefact, which bound ‘folk’ and ‘the pagan’ tighter still, was

Robin Hardy’s 1973 horror movie, The Wicker Man. When an upright Presbyterian

policeman, Sergeant Howie, is called to the remote Scottish island of Summerisle to

investigate the disappearance of a missing girl, he discovers that the islanders have

abandoned Christianity for a permissive paganism. Gradually he comes to suspect that

the girl is to be sacrificed. It is a trick, and Howie himself becomes the unwitting victim,

immolated in the wicker man of the title, a human sacrifice to propitiate the gods against

repeated harvest failures.

The film is Frazerian through and through, not only in its plot but in the way it depicts all

manner of actual folk customs (such as the use of a toad to cure a sore throat) as pagan

practices: the late Anthony Schaffer, who wrote the screenplay, was explicit about his

debt to The Golden Bough . Lord Summerisle, ostensibly the film’s baddy, played with 37

gusto by Christopher Lee, is Frazerian man incarnate, arriving at paganism through

rational choice. He admits to Howie to being a “heathen, conceivably, but not, I hope, an

unenlightened one” . The islanders, however, are Frazerian in the unintended, 38

emotionalist sense of having reverted to type. “The tradition of the arcane and the

mysterious cleaves to the people of this island with a tenacity which makes it seem an

inherent and inalienable possession” (Lord Summerisle to Howie ). 39

Allan Brown, Inside the Wicker Man: The Morbid Ingenuities (Basingstoke: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2000).37

Ibid, 222.38

Ibid, 217.39

The Frazerian backdrop also explains the horror of the film’s denouement. It is not so

much that we identify with Howie, with his futile cries for mercy drowned by roar of the

inferno and the music of the assembled crowd. Rather, it is that we identify more with the

islanders; for, however much we are attracted to their licentious freedoms, the idea that it

could so easily be us, singing merrily while the sacrifice burns, is what makes the film so

chilling. It evokes a profound feeling of das unheimliche by drawing on the now deeply

instilled Frazerian fear that paganism is something within us all.

Significantly, the film intensified that feeling through the cunning deployment of folk

music. Composed by Paul Giovanni, the score made full use of folk’s pagan and uncanny

semiotic associations, and, importantly, as the film gained cult status in the years

subsequent to its release, reinforced those associations in the popular imagination. “The

songs” said Christopher Lee, speaking in 2002, “sum up the atmosphere of the scenes

perfectly” . As we shall see, folk musicians would only have to reference the music of 40

The Wicker Man to be sure of evoking exactly the same atmosphere.

Having established the provenance of folk’s association with paganism – and the

emotional potency of the paganism it is supposed to preserve – it is time to examine the

ways in which contemporary musicians exploit that association. I identify three –

traditional folk, Pagan folk and dark folk – which must be regarded as tendencies only

The Wicker Man, The Wicker Man. The Original Soundtrack Album (CD, Silva Screen Records Ltd., 40

FILMCD330, 2002).

and not as clearly delineated types. Folk artists may express more than one tendency at

once, or none, or move between positions at different times. What the three tendencies

share is that they all express alterity. Sharp set ‘the folk’ in opposition to modernity;

Frazer, ‘the pagan’ to ‘the civilized’. To identify with either subjugated term is

automatically to embrace otherness. Alterity needs to be proclaimed for it to acquire any

potency, and the historical intertwining of folk music and paganism means that folk is the

perfect vehicle for doing so . 41

Traditional folk

Though the folk revival instigated by Cecil Sharp was hampered somewhat by the two

World Wars it continued in earnest during the second half of the twentieth century. In the

fifties, folk was reinvented as a vehicle of socialism by Ewan MacColl (1915-1989),

Peggy Seeger, Alan Lomax (1915-2002), Shirley Collins and others; in the sixties Davey

Graham (1940-2008), Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Martin Carthy, Roy Harper and others

produced a distinctive British guitar-based folk-blues, largely under the all-pervasive

influence of Bob Dylan; in the seventies folk was fused with rock by Fairport Convention

and Steeleye Span; in the eighties a wave of anti-Thatcher sentiment made folk political

again, producing figures like Billy Bragg and bands like the Pogues and the Levellers;

and from the late nineties onwards folk became increasingly professionalized,

bootstrapping itself into the wider British music industry . Now an agglomeration of 42

Andy Letcher, “The Role of the Bard in Contemporary Pagan Movements” (PhD. Thesis, King Alfred’s 41

College, Winchester, 2001).

Young, Electric Eden.42

agents, festival organisers, record-, TV- and radio- producers, CD distributors, journalists

and artists together comprise a ‘folk industry’, while, at the same time pub sessions,

ceilidhs and folk clubs cater for an important ground layer of amateur players. But,

however much traditional folk has adapted itself to the market, and as the name suggests,

it remains profoundly concerned with the correct and proper maintenance of ‘tradition’.

Ostensibly, traditional folk musicians play traditional folk music, which is to say the

corpus of songs, ballads and carols collected by Sharp and his contemporaries, and a

body of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish instrumental tunes – some of which date back

to collections from the seventeenth century or even earlier – using traditional acoustic

instruments: fiddle, flute, whistle, melodeon, concertina, guitar, mandolin, bagpipes and

so on. However, the way in which traditional material is played, and the contexts in

which it is performed, have changed so much, and so radically, that they share little in

common with the music of ‘source singers’ like John England.

So, while John England and others of his ilk sung unaccompanied and unpaid, modern

traditional folk musicians support songs with backing and the harmonic know-how of

classical music and jazz. Far from being the products of an oral tradition, many

professional folk musicians have undergone classical training, often to a high degree, and

learn their material from written sources or recordings. Musicians do not just play

traditional material but compose new songs and tunes in a traditional style. And today,

folk musicians form bands, record albums, play concerts to paying audiences, and expect

to make a living from their music, all of which would have astounded John England.

There is therefore a contradiction that runs through the contemporary traditional music

scene. On the one hand, traditional folk is as beholden to the market expectations of

novelty and innovation as any other aspect of the British popular music industry and as

such has been continually influenced by contemporaneous musical trends. (Thus, for

example, the guitar – the iconic instrument of ‘the folk singer’ – was actually imported

into British folk music from America during the fifties.) On the other hand, the scene has

taken upon itself the self-appointed task of upholding, maintaining and protecting the

‘tradition’ – “that great act of faith which is our indigenous musical inheritance” – from 43

exactly the kinds of innovations that market forces and contemporaneous trends would

impress upon it. These tensions, between innovation and tradition, between the individual

and ‘the folk’, have an important bearing upon traditional folk’s relationship to the

supposed pagan origins of its music.

Within traditional folk paganism (as laid out in the Frazerian paradigm) is regarded

ambivalently. In 2006, Norma Waterson and her husband Martin Carthy released an

album of seasonal songs, a homage to the seminal Frost and Fire of 1965, titled Holy

Heathens and the Old Green Man. Unlike its predecessor and apart from the obvious

Wood, The Lark Descending.43

implications of the title, there were no direct references to paganism in the sleeve notes . 44

Instead, attention and due deference were given to the tradition, that is, the sources from

which the duo acquired the material.

On his 2005 album The Lark Descending, Chris Wood – a torchbearer like Carthy and

Waterson – recorded the results of his collaboration with storyteller, Hugh Lupton. Two

of the songs, ‘Bleary Winter’ and ‘Walk this World,’ make distinctly Frazerian references,

evoking the (supposed) pagan origins of folk customs. In 2006, Wood and Lupton were

commissioned by BBC Radio 3 to make a ‘radio ballad’ about the traditional midwinter

mummers’ plays. The programme, England in Ribbons, mixed music, song, and

storytelling with archive recordings . A version of one of its songs, a setting of a 45

traditional mummers’ play to music, also called ‘England in Ribbons’, appeared on

Wood’s 2007 album Trespasser. Wood took a Frazerian reading of the drama, calling it an

“enduring midwinter ritual” of death and resurrection, and “English Voodoo at its finest!”

. However, all Wood’s Frazerian allusions appear to be for poetic or rhetorical purposes 46

only for he is an avowed and vocal atheist. On Trespasser he recorded what must count

as the first (and probably only) atheist ‘spiritual’, ‘Come Down Jehovah’.

Leaving personal religious orientation to one side, a clue to traditional folk’s ambivalence

towards paganism can be found right back on The Watersons’ 1965 Frost and Fire.

Waterson: Carthy, Holy Heathens and the Old Green Man (CD, Topic Records Ltd., TSCD562, 2006).44

Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/worldmusic/feature_mummers.shtml45

Chris Wood, Trespasser (CD, Ruf Records, RUFCD10, 2007).46

Ostensibly at least, it appeared as if this band of unaccompanied singers were openly

acknowledging folk’s debt to the pagan past. The sleeve notes, however, reveal an almost

Marxist distaste for it: “So much is talked of myth and sun worship and such, that it’s

necessary to recall that behind most of these calendar customs and the songs attached to

them lies nothing more mysterious, nothing less realistic, than the yearly round of work

carried out in the fields…it’s due to their relation with economic life, not to any mystical

connection, that the song-customs have persisted right up to our own time” . 47

Here then is the problem. People come to folk music for many reasons, but serious and

committed folk enthusiasts (nicknamed ‘folkies’) are attracted to it not just because they

like how it sounds or what it says, but because of the powerful sense of identity that

belonging to the tradition confers. Being a folkie is to feel one with the ‘common man’,

an identification that confers stability, continuity, community and respectability. But the

lingering Frazerian orthodoxy, which states that the tradition is founded on heinous

rituals and irrational superstition, does not sit well fit with this preferred notion of the

‘folk’ as producers and holders of a kind of canny, earthy, Herderian wisdom or common

sense (or as Chris Wood puts it, ‘the common sense’ ). The Frazerian paradigm 48

undermines that sense of stability and respectability, is upsetting or dangerous, and needs

to be made safe (just as the Watersons do.) In traditional folk, therefore, pagan

associations tend to be employed as lyrical or poetic devices, and typically in the service

The Watersons, Frost and Fire.47

Chris Wood, pers. comm.48

of an implicit working class discourse: that folk songs are the songs of the working

people, born out of the seasonal round of hard, physical labour.

Pagan Folk

Modern Pagans do not have such qualms: given that folk music is supposed to have

pagan origins it is unsurprising that modern Pagan religionists should want to play folk

music and to use it to express religious identities. In my doctoral investigation of music

within contemporary Paganism , I found that performers mostly adapted the kind of 49

music they ordinarily played outside Pagan contexts, be it blues, rock or folk, to Pagan

themes. That said, because many performance settings require that players play

acoustically – at camps and festivals, say – and necessarily because of folk’s pagan

associations, there is a gravitational pull towards playing traditional songs and tunes. But

lacking at present a distinct musical style, Pagan identity music is best defined by its

lyrical content and subject matter.

Perhaps the most famous Pagan musician in Britain today, and the closest that Paganism

has to a star, is Damh the Bard (pronounced ‘Dave the Bard’). Damh is a Druid, an active

member of Druidry’s largest Order, the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD), and

a regular performer at Pagan moots, camps and conferences. He has released six albums

Letcher, The Role of the Bard49

to date and a book of his most popular songs; he keeps a regular blog and produces a

monthly ‘Druidcast’ of Pagan music and interviews . 50

Live, Damh accompanies himself on acoustic guitar and often constructs his songs

around rock chord progressions (he began his musical life as a drummer in a metal band),

adding big, anthemic choruses. Folkier elements are more apparent on his albums, where

mandolin, whistle and harp add melodic lines. The songs are almost always expressly

about Pagan themes and he intersperses his compositions with traditional folk songs that

lend themselves to Pagan readings, such as the Cornish May song, ‘Hal an Tow’.

The chorus of his ‘Spirit of Albion’, from the 2006 album of the same name provides a

good example of his work.

The Crane, the wolf,

the bear and the boar,

No longer dwell upon these shores,

You say that the Goddess and God

have gone,

Well I tell you they live on!

For in the cities and hills,

And in circles of stone,

www.paganmusic.co.uk50

The voices of the Old Ways,

The Spirit of Albion is calling you home! 51

The song, a fast minor waltz, presents the pagan past as a time when wild animals were

still extant and hence the land was in some sense more vital. As a Pagan, Damh has

regained a magical connection to the land, its God and Goddess, and the ‘Old Ways’. To

be a Pagan is necessarily to reawaken to the ‘Spirit of Albion’, to heal the sense of

alienation between ourselves and nature caused by modernity, and thus to come ‘home’.

The figure of the Bard is central to Druidry, as is the quest for awen, or inspiration, a kind

of divine afflatus that can supposedly be channelled into creative acts . Druid groups 52

have established public bardic competitions in Bath, Glastonbury, Exeter, Winchester and

other towns and cities. The winner, who is judged to have composed the best poem or

song on a given theme, holds the ‘Bardic chair’ for a year, and is expected to undertake

public performances and workshops to promote the bardic arts . As with Damh’s 53

material, bardic songs tend not to be devotional, or hymns, but refer to insider, Pagan

themes and therefore serve to proclaim a religious identity.

Damh the Bard, The Spirit of Albion (CD, self-released available from www.paganmusic.co.uk, 2006). 51

Lyrics printed with the author’s permission.

Andy Letcher, “What is a Bard?,”, in The 2012 Mount Haemus Awards (Lewes: The Order of Bards, 52

Ovates and Druids, forthcoming).

Ibid; Kevan Manwaring, The Bardic Handbook: The Complete Manual for the Twenty-First Century 53

Bard (Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications).

Another, less well-known genre of Pagan folk flourished during the 1990s, emerging out

of radical environmental protest culture, a genre I term tribedelica . The 90s saw a range 54

of protests against airport expansion, car culture, GM crops, live animal exports, and,

most famously, road-building, that produced a lively counter-culture which was broadly

(though not exclusively) Pagan in outlook. Eco-Paganism spoke the language of

Paganism – often marking full moons and the eight festivals of the wheel of the year –

but eschewed formal group affiliation and choreographed ritual. Eco-Paganism was

something celebrated, and the best way to express any religious sentiment one might feel

towards the natural world was to do something active to protect it. The slogan ‘Gaia told

me to do it’ was the nearest thing to an Eco-Pagan manifesto . 55

Eco-Paganism acquired its own mythology, the belief that protesters were some

prehistoric tribe, returned to save the land from the ravages of modernity and to usher

back an ‘archaic revival’ , an ecstatic and psychedelic form of paganism that would 56

reconnect culture and nature. ‘Pok’ – aka Simon Miller, lead singer of tribedelic band,

Space Goats (and who in fact coined the term tribedelica) – called that feeling of ecstatic

connection with the land ‘enhurument’: the band’s mantra, and mission statement, was

Letcher, The Role of the Bard.54

Andy Letcher, “‘Gaia told me to do it’: Resistance and the Idea of Nature Within Contemporary British 55

Eco-Paganism”, EcoTheology 8 (2003), 61-84; Andy Letcher, “‘There’s Bulldozers in the Fairy Garden’: Re-Enchantment Narratives in British Eco-Paganism”, in Popular Spiritualities: The Politics of Contemporary Enchantment, ed. Lynne Hume and Kathleen Phillips (London: Ashgate, 2005).

Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual 56

Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991).

‘get thee enhurued’ . The Dongas Tribe – the original road-protesters from Twyford 57

Down, near Winchester – actually lived for a while as an itinerant tribe, travelling the

droves of southern England with hand-carts, goats, chickens and musical instruments.

As a musical genre, tribedelica was a kind of upbeat psychedelic folk that mixed

medieval-style tunes and drones with the rhythms of techno to produce a self-consciously

acoustic ‘organic trance’. Favoured instruments included fiddle, whistle, hammered

dulcimer, mandolin, bouzouki, saz, djembe, didgeridoo, hurdy-gurdy and bagpipes,

instruments that were unusual and exotic and in themselves signs of otherness and

alterity. As well as the Space Goats and the Dongas Tribe, bands included Heathens All

and my own Jabberwocky. A much greater range of individual songwriters and

performers were captured on a series of cassette releases, ‘Tribal Voices’, recorded

around the country at various protest sites . 58

Songs were almost exclusively about Eco-Pagan themes: about protecting the Earth and

the re-enchanted sense of belonging that would result for those who did. The Space

Goats’ first album, Inamorata, told the story of an eponymous heroine, travelling to

Avebury stone circle to raise up a slumbering dragon (a symbol for the mysterious earth

Simon Miller, pers. comm.57

www.tribalvoices.org.uk58

energy, supposedly channelled by prehistoric megalithic builders ) and thereby to save 59

the land . 60

The typical tribedelic performance (when not actually providing a soundtrack for actual

protests) was the participatory fireside jam. When, in the mid nineties, various protesters

started travelling to the annual Rencontres Internationales des Luthiers et Maîtres

Sonneurs (the International Meeting of Instrument Makers and Master Pipers) at Saint

Chartier in Central France, they started to incorporate French and Breton bagpipe tunes,

with accompanying dances, into their music. This led to protracted sessions in which

these austere and superficially simple tunes were played repeatedly for twenty minutes or

more as vehicles of enhurument. Tribedelica effectively ended with the hiatus in road-

building in Britain at the end of the nineties, but many of its leading figures have gone on

to become professional or semi-professional folk musicians, playing for French and

Breton dance in Britain and Europe.

Finally, brief mention must be made of the growth in explicitly Pagan Morris sides.

Frazer thought Morris dancing the relic of a fertility rite, and though this fancy has long

been disproved (it originated as a Tudor Court dance ) it is a stubborn myth that persists 61

in popular culture: if Morris dancing is pagan then it stands to reason that modern Pagans

Andy Letcher, “Raising the Dragon: Folklore and the Development of Contemporary British Eco-59

Paganism”, The Pomegranate 6, no. 2 (2004), 175-198.

Space Goats, Inamorata and Other Tales (cassette, self-released, available from 60

www.pondlifestudios.com, 1993).

Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: oxford 61

University Press, 2006).

should Morris dance. Border Morris is the favoured style. Less precise than Cotswold

Morris, Border Morris uses sticks rather than handkerchiefs; dancers wear be-feathered

top hats and elaborately tattered costumes; and the rowdy dances are performed with

considerable verve and gusto to the accompaniment of melodeons, drums and

occasionally bagpipes. The Wild Hunt, Armaleggan and Vixen Morris are just three

Pagan sides (the latter being comprised of women) and most are Wiccan in orientation.

They dance publicly, but regard what they do as a covert but necessary form of seasonal

worship.

Dark Folk

I have already mentioned Cold Spring’s 2007 compilation, John Barleycorn Reborn

(which, as I write, has just been followed by a successor, We Bring you a King with a

Head of Gold ). That an underground label specializing in ‘dark industrial’, ‘black 62

ambient’, ‘doom’ and ‘power electronics’ , saw fit to release an album of folk music is 63

perhaps surprising (though not in the light of the connections that the present volume

illuminates), although their definition of folk is rather different from that of the

traditionalists described above. The sleeve notes state: “There has been a growing seam

of alternative folk music emerging since the folk revival of the 1950s moving beyond

concerns about popular music and exploring the original traditions whilst incorporating a

range of progressive or experimental styles. This is largely unacknowledged within the

Various Artists, We Bring you a King with a Head of Gold: Dark Britannica II (CD, Cold Spring, 62

CSR100CD, 2010).

Cold Spring, Cold Spring: What we are, http://www.coldspring.co.uk/what_we_are.php63

area of [traditional] folk music but is equally sincere in its aims” . That those ‘original 64

traditions’ were pagan (and hence Frazerian) is suggested in the name Cold Spring

supplied for the genre: ‘dark folk’ (though elsewhere it is known as strange folk, wyrd

folk, twisted folk, nu-folk, alt-folk, prog folk, psych folk, folkedelia, acid folk or post-

folk).

Unlike Pagan folk, dark folk is more obviously a defined musical genre. It consists of

folk songs performed in a ‘progressive’, ‘experimental’, or psychedelic manner – that is,

through the mixing of traditional and electric instruments with overt use of digital

processing and textures – or new songs about pagan, Frazerian, themes. It makes

extensive use of minor modes (dorian, aeolian and to a lesser extent, phrygian); drones

(played using synths, looped samples or instruments such as bagpipes, hurdy-gurdies,

Indian tampuras and shruti boxes); sparse or austere harmonies; and bells, chimes and

other percussion. The tempo is typically slow or downbeat and the music is self-

consciously uncanny.

Dark folk makes implicit and explicit reference to bands such as mordant entho-goth

minimalists, Dead Can Dance, and to the array of prog, psychedelic and underground folk

and folk-rock bands that flourished during the late sixties and early seventies, the so-

called ‘progressive moment’: The Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Comus, Fairport

Various Artists, John Barleycorn Reborn.64

Convention, The Young Tradition, and C.O.B., to name a few . And dark folk repeatedly 65

references the most totemic music of all: the soundtrack to The Wicker Man. Semiotically

complex, therefore, dark folk is knowingly referential. It both evokes the imagined pagan

past and a period of recent musical and cultural history that has, for artists who were

mostly children at the time, become something of a golden age.

Dark folk gained popularity and came to prominence during the noughties thanks to a

number of factors: the release of a series of compilations of underground or acid folk

from the 60s and 70s – Fuzzy Felt Folk, Gather in the Mushrooms: The British Acid Folk

Underground, Early Morning Hush: Notes From the UK Folk Underground 1969-1976;

the first, complete stereo release of The Wicker Man soundtrack; the release of similar

compilations of contemporary dark folk – John Barleycorn Reborn, Strange Folk and

Folk Off!, the latter complied by DJ Rob da Bank; popular and carefully marketed

festivals that catered expressly for this music – The Green Man and Moseley Folk

festivals; interest from magazines and webzines – Shindig Magazine, Magpie Magazine,

the Ptolomaic Terrascope and Spiral Earth; and media interest from the then rock critic of

The Times, Pete Paphides, and The Guardian’s Will Hodgkinson . The former appeared 66

See Blake, The Land Without Music; Young, Electric Eden.65

Various Artists, Fuzzy-Felt Folk. A Small Collection of Rare, Delightful Folk Oddities for Strange Adults 66

and Maybe Their Children Too (CD, Trunk Records, JBH018CD, 2006); Various Artists, 2004. Gather in the Mushrooms. The British Acid Folk Underground 1968-1974 (CD, Sanctuary Records, CMQCD840, 2004); Various Artists, Early Morning Hush: Notes From the UK Folk Underground 1969-1976 (CD, Sanctuary Records, CMQCD1265); The Wicker Man, The Wicker Man; Various Artists, John Barleycorn Reborn; Various Artists, Strange Folk (CD, Albion Records, 2006); Various Artists, Folk Off: New Folk and Psychedelia From the British Isles and North America – Compiled by Rob da Bank (CD, Sunday Best, SBESTCD12, 2006). The influence of American nu-folk artists such as Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and Espers, was also significance, but a full discussion is beyond the scope of this paper.

in an article about ‘new folk’ on BBC2’s The Culture Show, broadcast on 3rd February

2007, while the latter wrote a series of articles for The Guardian about his efforts to set

up a record label, ‘Big Bertha’, and to promote the Cornish dark folk band Thistletown

(whose album Rosemarie was released on Big Bertha in 2007).

Other dark folk acts include cod-medievalists Circulus, Tunng, The Eighteenth Day of

May, The Owl Service, Sieben, Pantalaimon, Mary Hampton, Tinkerscuss, Vashti Bunyan

(who began her career in the 60s), Drohne, English Heretic, and my own Telling the

Bees.

These three tendencies – traditional folk, Pagan folk and dark folk – are, of course,

exactly that – tendencies – and the messy world is more complicated than my typology

would suggest. For example, Sharron Kraus is a folk singer with an underground, cult

following in Britain and America. She is openly a Pagan and an occultist and has released

her own round of Frazerian-themed, seasonal songs, Right Wantonly a-Mumming . By 67

rights she ‘belongs’ in Pagan folk. However, her songs, which employ drones, chimes,

liberal use of minor seconds, and unsettling lyrics, all performed with her idiosyncratic

spidery voice, evoke a profound feeling of das unheimliche, and so typify dark folk. And

yet she is also a traditional singer and player, a stalwart of folk clubs and sessions. She

belongs to all categories, and none, striking her own path through the contested realm of

folk.

Sharron Kraus, Right Wantonly a-Mumming. A Collection of Seasonal Songs and Celebrations by 67

Sharron Kraus (CD, Bo’Weavil Recordings, weavil25CD, 2006).

Folk, Paganism and das unheimliche

Our notions of ‘folk music’ and ‘the pagan’ are historically intertwined, sharing roots that

go back to German romanticism and the idealism of Herder and Grimm. This odd

symbiosis has bequeathed us the idea that folk music is something old and other, at odds

with modernity and urban living. Most of us now live in towns or cities but folk music

typically expresses a desire for the supposed rooted certainties of the countryside and a

lost bucolic golden age . Clearly the popularity of both folk and Paganism says much 68

about our contemporary and oft-commented yearning for an imagined, enchanted past . 69

Though the fortunes of folk music wax and wane in cycles far less predictable than those

that drive the agricultural year, its renewed fecundity has much to do with the wealth of

pagan connotations it has accrued, and, as a result, its power to invoke das unheimliche.

For traditional folk musicians it is the homeliness afforded by tradition that matters and

so ‘the pagan’ can only be brought inside occasionally, like a dangerous guest, before

being sent firmly on its way again. By contrast, those magical and uncanny connotations

are exactly what attract modern Pagans to folk music. They, too, are looking for a sense

of home, only this time a re-enchanted one, one imbued with what Damh the Bard calls

the ‘Spirit of Albion’. The risk, of course, is that in doing so, by making das unheimliche,

Boyes, The Imagined Village; Young, Electric Eden.68

See Letcher, op. cit., 2006; Lynne Hume and Kathleen McPhillips, eds, Popular Spiritualities: The 69

Politics of Contemporary Enchantment (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006).

heimliche – the unhomely, homely – they strip folk music of the very thing that gave it its

attractive power in the first place.

But when the pagan past is alluded to, hinted at, touched upon, or evoked such that the

imagination can fill in the gaps with all its ambivalent relish – as dark folk self-

consciously attempts to do – then folk’s ability to unsettle us, to upset the ordered

certainties of urban life and to make us feel anything but at home, finds full expression.

Folk was never pagan but the twentieth century made it so. Now, for many, it embodies

or is synonymous with the idea of the pagan, a pervasive, if mistaken, myth of our

origins. Consequently it provides modern musicians with a fecund source of inspiration,

one that will undoubtedly provide a rich harvest for years to come. Or, as The Watersons

put it back in 1965, “to our toiling ancestors…[folk songs]…meant everything, and in a

queer irrational way they can still mean much to us” . 70

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